Molly was 88 years old and in good health. She had survived two husbands, her siblings, most of her friends and her only son.
“I have no meaningful relationships left, dear,” she told me. “They’ve all died. And you know what? Underneath it all, I want to leave this world too.” She leaned a little closer, as if telling me a secret, and continued:
لدي تمت مقابلته many elderly for research. Every now and then I am struck by the sincerity with which some people feel that their lives are complete. They seem tired of living.
I am a member of European فهم تعب الحياة في شبكة أبحاث كبار السن, a group of geriatricians, psychiatrists, social scientists, psychologists and death researchers. We want to better understand the phenomenon and remove what is unique about it. The network also works with advice to politicians and healthcare practitioners as well as healthcare providers and patient support.
Professor of Health Ethics Els van Wijngaarden and colleagues in the Netherlands listened to a group of elderly people who were not seriously ill, but still felt a longing to end their lives. The key problems they identified in such people were: aching loneliness, pain associated with not playing a role, struggle with self-expression, existential fatigue, and fear of being reduced to a completely dependent state.
This need not be the result of a lifetime of suffering, or a response to excruciating physical pain. Life fatigue also seems to occur in people who consider themselves to have lived satisfactory lives. A 92-year-old man told the network’s researchers:
قال رجل آخر:
معاناة فريدة
الروائي الأمريكي wrote Philip Roth that “old age is not a battle, old age is a massacre”. If we live long enough, we can lose our identity, physical abilities, partners, friends and careers.
لبعض الناس، this induces a deep-seated sense that life has been robbed of meaning – and that the tools we need to rebuild a sense of purpose are irretrievable.
Healthcare professor Helena Larsson and colleagues in Sweden have كتب عن a gradual “lights out” in old age. They claim that people steadily let go of life, until they reach a point where they are ready to shut off the outside world. Larsson’s team asks the question whether this could be inevitable for all of us.
Of course, this type of suffering shares characteristics (it is depressing and painful) with anxiety we encounter at other points in life. But it’s not the same thing. Consider the existential suffering that can arise from a terminal illness or recent divorce. In these examples, part of the suffering is connected to the fact that there is more of life’s journey to be made – but that the rest of the journey feels uncertain and no longer looks like we imagined it would.
This type of suffering is often tied to grieving a future we feel we should have had, or fearing a future we are unsure of. One of the differences in the weariness of life is that there is no desire for, or mourning of, a future; just a deep sense that the journey is over, but dragging on painfully and endlessly.
وجهة النظر العالمية
In countries where euthanasia and assisted suicide exist شروط وأحكامطبيب و مناظرة العلماء if the weariness of life reaches the threshold of that kind معاناة عاطفية مستمرة which gives people the right to euthanasia.
The fact that this problem is common enough for researchers to discuss it may indicate that modern life has shut older people out of Western society. Maybe oldest it is لم يعد يحترم for their wisdom and experience. But it is not inevitable. In Japan, old age is seen as a spring or rebirth after a busy period of work and child-rearing. A study found older adults in Japan showed higher score on personal growth compared to middle-aged adults, while the opposite age pattern was found in the United States.
Surgeon and Medical Professor أتول جواندي argues that in Western societies, medicine has created the ideal conditions for turning aging into a “long, slow fade”. He believes that quality of life has been overlooked as we channel our resources toward biological survival. This is unprecedented in history. Life weariness can be proof of the cost.
Author: Sam Carr – Reader in Education with Psychology and Center for Death and Society, University of Bath 
المصدر sn. dk